PSC: Christian Social Party

The joke goes that the PSC is now the Christian Social Party. Salvador Illa has been explicit since he became president in his ideological positioning, which he bases on Christian humanism. The same that Pope Prevost, Leo XIV, defends, as has been made clear in his first encyclical. The social aspect of this pontiff is even more solid than that of his popular predecessor, the Argentine Bergoglio. Prevost has become a strong global voice in favor of welcoming immigrants, in favor of the most vulnerable, against the renewed warmongering of Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin, in favor of cultural dialogue and against platform capitalism which polarizes society, both ideologically and economically, with a logic of merely pecuniary use of algorithms and artificial intelligence.

Marxism has long since faded from socialist discourse. Then, social democracy was discredited by decades of placid connivance with neoliberalism. Some now want to resurrect it. Illa has renamed it "Christian humanism": putting the vulnerable person at the center and emphasizing social justice, equal opportunities. The president of Catalonia and the Pope of Rome speak the same language. On the other hand, President Sánchez has approached Prevost for geopolitical strategy, for anti-Trump coincidence, but he does not have the explicit Christian social connection of the tenant of the Generalitat. Illa goes to mass, Sánchez does not. In fact, Sánchez, as Spanish president, will attend a mass at the Sagrada Familia for the first time.

Catalonia is a more secularized country than Spain, less Catholic and, in the segment that still declares itself so, less observant. Less than 10% of marriages are performed by the Church: 91% are civil. But, despite the rise of the far-right (Aliança and Vox), it is a country where social discourse is rooted: even far-right parties use a xenophobic social discourse of the type "our people first." The others out, let them fend for themselves. When a bishop or the Pope scolds them for this lack of charity or empathy with the most disadvantaged, or with those of other religious beliefs (Islamophobia), their heads explode. Trump has dedicated himself to mocking his compatriot Pope. We will see how Orriols and Abascal receive Leo XIV when he stands by the immigrants.

But is Catalan centrality Christian Democratic? No. The Church carries a very heavy burden. Sexual abuse, Francoist national-Catholicism, structural sexism, and ossification on moral issues (abortion, homosexuality) have alienated a large part of the population. But at the same time, in political and social terms, its current discursive positioning is clearly left-wing, even if this bothers the classic "priest-eater" left. With Illa, it fits perfectly, even more so than with classic Pujolism, and certainly more than with Pujol's heirs, who are increasingly conditioned by ultra competition.

The social doctrine of the Church, inaugurated by Leo XIII at the end of the 19th century as a response to the tensions of the Industrial Revolution, and later passed through the aggiornamento" of the Second Vatican Council in the late 1960s, is today deepened by Leo XIV, who wants to respond to the globalized inequalities of the post-industrial era. And who also wants to root the Church in local communities everywhere, especially in peripheral ones where European colonialism – often with the complicity of the Church itself – caused havoc. The recognition of singularities – for example linguistic ones – and local vulnerabilities – such as the exploitation of natural resources to the detriment of indigenous populations – is part of the vision of this pontiff, who for years worked as a missionary in Peru.

It is not a coincidence, therefore, that in Catalonia, in his program of visits, Prevost has included a parish in Barcelona's Raval – Sant Agustí; he is an Augustinian and knows it – and the Can Brians prison. And it is to be expected that Leo XIV will give the Catalan language the treatment it deserves as the native, and at the same time marginalized, language of the country presided over by Salvador Illa, a Christian humanist like himself.